Why I Don’t Like Cyber Mondays

It’s Cyber Monday again. And in fact, it’s been Cyber Monday for a week or so now. Retailers, desperate for sales to make up for a lousy year — for lousy years, really — have been rolling out the specials since early last week. And, of course, Cyber Monday follows Small Business Saturday which comes immediately after Black Friday.

Really? Can we just cut the nonsense and please just acknowledge that these are all basically the same thing, which is an end-of-year holiday sale?

There are going to be a thousand stories about Cyber Monday bargains today. Maybe 10,000. It will be touted in all the morning TV shows. Tech blogs and newspapers will point to Cyber Monday exclusives. The great media machine will work mightily to service the American consumer’s insatiable appetite for a bargain. And in all likelihood, thanks to an economy that’s somewhat on the rebound coupled with an ever-growing number of online-first shoppers, Cyber Monday will be bigger than ever this year.

Which is exactly why we should stop paying attention to it.

What we’re seeing is just the natural maturation of retail. Shopping is different today than it was a decade ago. It’s telling that some of the best bargains to be found now are offered by traditional retailers with traditional storefronts in traditional malls. And the things people are looking to buy? They’re largely the same things we’ve always bought. Sweaters and toys lead the pack, followed by electronics.

Maybe the term made sense when Shop.org coined it in 2004. But continuing to call it Cyber Monday after we as a society have so fully and completely embraced and incorporated the Internet into our lives is utterly anachronistic. It’s just an extended post-Thanksgiving day sale, and it’s everywhere, online and off. There’s nothing uniquely “cyber” about it.

Look, I love tech jargon as much as the next gadget blogger. And discounts? Yes please. But “Cyber Monday” is a joke; a gimmick conceived by online retailers to gin up interest in what was not yet a real thing. And, okay, it grew into something real-ish, where retailers actually do offer up sales that go beyond mere free shipping. (So much so that we now apparently have to call it “cyber week.”) But odds are overwhelming that with or without the term, online retailers would be offering discounts this week anyway because, you know, every other retailer is having a sale anyway.

Enough. Shut up. It’s a near-universal holiday sale, some of which happens to also take place online.

There are going to be lots of sales, every day, until Christmas Day. The day after Christmas will have even bigger discounts. This is an end-of-the-year thing. There are a lot of things on sale today on the internet. There are also a lot of things on sale today in stores that you can walk around inside of.

And so here we are, stuck with this thing. This horrible term that started off as a bullshit marketing device, bolstered by an uncritical press hungry for eyeballs and ad dollars, which savvy merchants eventually made kind of real. But it’s just a sale. A sale that starts earlier and ends later every year. A sale that spreads to more and more places, online and off. Big boxes, local merchants, etailers; you name it. Everyone has a holiday sale. Can we quit with the charade yet?

Cyber Monday exists not to benefit consumers, but retailers who can use it as yet another marketing channel and the press, which can get viewers out of it by pretending it’s something special. The sales are happening anyway. The term of art is just a way to get you to pay attention to it.

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